Position sensorless control of a magnetically levitated system

The investigation of magnetically levitated systems as a means of ground transportation has been going on for several decades. As a result several methods of control for these systems have been proposed. However, these methods rely on the information provided by sensors that are prone to failure and noise. This paper presents a sensor less position control scheme of a laboratory-based magnetically levitated system. The proposed method makes use of systempsilas magnetic signatures, namely inductance, back electromotive force, etc. that contain embedded position information and the voltage equation of the active phase. This speed intensive (or MIPS intensive) methodology can be implemented on a high performance- DSP controller. In addition, FEM analysis has been carried out to obtain the static and dynamics characteristics of the system. Simulation results will be shown to demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach.